Lois de Vries' Garden Views

Looking for sustainable gardening information on native plants? Check out the Sustainable Gardening Library’s Topics app and learn from the experts at public gardens and arboreta, colleges and universities, and government agencies. They’re sharing their knowledge with you all in one place, so you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web. Thirty-nine organizations from around the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, are sharing their photos, plant lists, and growing tips with us to help you identify and select plants that are best suited to the conditions in your geographic region or plant hardiness zone. Just go to the Library’s Topics Directory , and select the Native Plants icon to open up an interactive map that shows the locations of our content providers. Click on any map pin to open a popup that provides collaborator details and a link to the materials they’ve contributed to the Sustainable Gardening Library. You’ll find a wide variety of things to enjoy, including

  Online, all the time. Sustainable gardening, farming and green infrastructure projects around the country are at your fingertips in the Sustainable Gardening Library 24/7. Search for the term sustainable gardening on the web and Google will return more than 79.9 million results. Beneficial insects will net you nearly 60 million; stormwater management , 13 million; sustainable farming , 217 million; and native plants , 835 million.  With so much information available, how can you find sustainable gardening, sustainable farming, sustainable land use, and sustainable infrastructure information you can trust without spending hours searching all over the internet? And how would you know whether the source of that information was reliable? Well, what if you could go to a single website that focused only on these sustainability issues, find curated information supplied by experts at public gardens, universities, and government agencies, sorted into 25 or 30 easily understood categories, a

Why is the EcoRegions app important? Most homeowners who’ve dabbled in gardening have heard of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zones, which tell us the average minimum temperature range for where we live. There are a total of 26 zones and sub-zones; 12 of them generally appear on plant labels to help us determine whether a plant we want to buy can survive the winter in our zone. But plant hardiness is only one of multiple factors that determine whether a plant will thrive in any particular garden. Others include soil type, climate, terrain, natural vegetation, and how rivers, streams, and similar water features flow through the landscape. The Environmental Protection Agency has codified this information, gathered from several different Federal agencies, into nearly 200 categories called Ecoregions.   What Is the Sustainable Gardening Library EcoRegions app? The EcoRegions app is a an online tool that combines the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map with the EPA North American Ecoregions Map into a

If you want to become a better steward of our planet’s resources through how you grow plants, check out The Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app.  We collect the latest tips and resources from public gardens, universities, and government agencies nationwide and put everything in one place so you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what you need. Browse through more than 25 topics that tackle the best ways to grow flowers and food, create outdoor living spaces, and handle common landscape challenges in more Earth-friendly ways. 

At the Sustainable Gardening Institute, we’re confident that most homeowners would prefer to have an eco-friendly garden landscape based on solid science, if they knew what to do. But even as they yearn for healthy, chemical-free surroundings, questions arise. Questions such as, “Where do I start?” From where you are right now. Right where you’re standing. At ground level. Learning the basics of your specific ecoregion and plant hardiness zone now will save you time, effort, and heartbreak later because that is the foundation for selecting plants that are easier to grow and more likely to succeed. It doesn’t matter whether you’re planning a garden for your own backyard or a landscape project for huge business campus, the basics are the same. In this post, we’ll define what an ecoregion is, then explain why ecoregions are important in sustainable gardening, how they can be useful to both home gardeners and professionals alike, and get you started using ecoregion

Enjoy a virtual tour of one of our collaborator’s gardens Why use the Sustainable Gardening Library’s Featured Garden App? Most public gardens can’t be thoroughly explored or appreciated in a single day. You can use our virtual tour to map out your visit before you leave home, or use it while you’re there to prioritize which features you want to see first. Or, just take a virtual tour of one of our finest gardens from your easy chair on a rainy afternoon.  The Sustainable Gardening Library is device-responsive, meaning that the software detects what platform you’re using to access it and renders the library in the format that is most appropriate for your device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone). These directions are for accessing our Library via desktop, laptop, or tablet. What Is the Sustainable Gardening Library Featured Garden? This section of the Sustainable Gardening Library provides a virtual tour of one of our collaborating institutions’ gardens. The Featured G

How to find out who’s doing forward-thinking work in sustainable gardening and farming near you. Have you ever wondered whether a public garden, town, or university near you was working to make their landscape or campus more sustainable? Or, whether they had a demonstration garden you could check out for ideas? We did, too. And as our family of content collaborators grows, we’re adding their stories to a special section of the Sustainable Gardening Library. Search the Library by Sustainable Gardening Organization This section of the Sustainable Gardening Library provides a more detailed description of all of our collaborating institutions, maps their locations including contact information, and provides a master list with links to everything they’ve posted in our Library. How to use the Sustainable Gardening Library Organizations app 1. Click on the Organization button on the Library’s Home Page. 2.  Click on a map pin,  or   hover your cursor over the radio buttons in the left